‘The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek’ is as Nightmarish as it is Goofy

August 10, 2021

The action in the screwball comedy The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944) is so unfalteringly goofy that we sometimes forget that its premise is fundamentally nightmarish; it could easily be refigured for a tragic drama complementary to its era’s cultural mores. It’s about a teenage girl, Trudy Kockenlocker (Betty Hutton), who attends a going-away dance for her midwestern hometown’s GIs. She accidentally

bonks her head so hard on a chandelier when a dance partner lifts her up that once she’s on her feet again she feels fall-down drunk. Next thing Trudy knows, she’s crashing the car she borrowed to get to the festivities into the local movie theater the next morning. Hazy memories of a wedding ceremony start trickling in as the hours pass. She was, she’s pretty sure, the bride; the groom has a question mark in lieu of a face. Trudy doesn’t know where to look for answers — she thinks she gave the minister a fake name, for starters. (Could it have sounded faker than Trudy Kockenlocker?) But she can’t just stop the search — soon she finds out she’s pregnant.

The movie, jauntily written and directed by the decade’s preeminent satirist Preston Sturges, doesn’t explicitly weigh ideas of Trudy being essentially taken advantage of and assaulted. She’s such a goofball — the kind of person who is introduced to us performing in front of a group of Army men, lip-synching to a male singer’s tuba-deep voice like an overeager class clown desperate for a laugh — that the film suggests its driving catastrophe is not that much different than any of the other innocuous antics that ostensibly interrupt her life on the regular. The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek mostly focuses on, then culls comedy from, a different dilemma springing from the main conflict. Without a husband at her side (whichever GI she wed skipped town), Trudy will almost certainly be shunned for having a child out of wedlock. And if she tries to get married to a man who could be counted on as a stable force in her life — and could pose as her baby daddy — she could go to jail for bigamy.

Dark stuff! Yet Sturges keeps everything steadily loony and funny — something that miraculously never feels incongruous with the subject matter. You’re never not having a good time as you’re watching Trudy and the primarily bumbling people in her life try to throw water on this fire. It isn’t until after you’ve finished watching the movie that its central bleakness (of having to frantically manage social perceptions of yourself before wrestling in any capacity what it is that has happened to you) really settles in. Then again, most comedies work like this: finding enough levity in objectively horrible situations to make you temporarily not think very hard about their foundational horribleness.

Plotting with her comparatively level-headed younger sister Emmy (a wonderful Diana Lynn), Trudy figures the best person to help her out of this mess is Norval Jones (Eddie Bracken), a local 4F boy who has spent most of his life unrequitedly in love with her. He’s so enamored of Trudy that he can still remember certain outfits she wore on certain days in elementary school; just looking at her can ignite an explosion of stammers. Emmy and Trudy figure it wouldn’t take much to persuade him to get married to his crush, that he probably wouldn’t make much of a fuss if affected by bigamy charges, had to co-parent a child that isn’t his own. All of these predictions prove true. Though Norvel — a nervous wreck who can’t even propose to Trudy without falling off her family’s deck and knocking over a spate of decorative plants on the tumble down — usually loses himself on a factory line of freaked-out stutters after Trudy reveals a new piece of information about what exactly she needs him for. It takes a lot for him to cool off — his neuroses overheat him.

For most of The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, the Kockenlocker girls have an obstacle in their cartoonishly conservative police chief father (William Demarest, pitch-perfectly grouchy). He tends to agree with local newspaper editorials with titles like “Are Military Marriages a Menace?,” and has an open palm ready for any man who seems, from his vantage point, to be treating one of his daughters improperly. Constable Kockenlocker’s funnily intimidating sternness usually

gets the hot gas taken out of it, though. Demarest, ever game, on more than one occasion trips with the limbs-everywhere animation of a caricature slipping on a banana peel; most of his dialogue makes him sound like a no-fun fool. Everyone, like Demarest, is enthusiastic to give life to the script’s constant silliness. The performances are across-the-board (and atypically) hilarious; you don’t detect any of the actors fussing over how funny they’re being. You’d think we would at least notice some in-their-own-headedness in the comparably terrific Hutton and Bracken, who were reportedly ultra-conscious of who was going to run away with the film to the point of feuding on set. They’re both great, though maybe they should have been more worried about Demarest and Lynn.

Surprisingly, Sturges was continuously fleshing out the script while The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek was in production. Surprising because its most scintillating lines are boldly acidic enough to feel considered rather than written on the fly; surprising because its satirical jabs at myopic patriotism and the evils of small-town conservatism are so cogent that you’d never guess Sturges’ well-sustained underbelly of contempt had been finalized with a clock ticking noisily behind him. The insertions of pathos work out well, too; the movie has no problem pivoting from the absurd to the touching without losing its comedic momentum.

1944 is often looked at as Sturges’ last great year before the extraordinary run of beloved movies beginning with 1940’s The Great McGinty petered out for increasingly diminishing success. (Though now most people, myself included, consider one of his later movies, Unfaithfully Yours, up to par with his peak-period best; I also really like the much-maligned The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend, from 1949.) The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek encapsulates what made and makes this writer-director so distinctive: a fast, frequently flat-out-cuckoo style of comedy that revealed beneath its silly surface a perceptive disdain for the era’s hypocrisies and wrong-headed cultural norms. Sturges invested in the idea that hearty laughter didn’t have to be synonymous with pure escapism, and that you could approach serious ideas with a big grin.